In general XML documents or fragments are held in strings as text markup. In SQL Server, XML variables and columns are instead tokenised to allow rapid access to the data within. This is fine, but can cause some odd problems, such as ' entitization'. What do you do if you need to preserve the formatting? As usual Rob Sheldon comes to our aid.   Read more...

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find and replace text in a text file using tsql   Read more...

Search entire database for occurrence of any text!  Read more...

This script will determine if a string is alphanumeric   Read more...

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Find and Replace a string in all string fields (char, varchar, etc) of all tables in the database.  Read more...

A function to replace tab characters with the correct number of spaces to align the text as originally intended.  Read more...

This function will take a string parameter and find all numbers in it.  Read more...

It is recommended that you remove all special characters and HTML formatting. This task can be handled in TSQL code, however in this case I have the opportunity to use .NET and the power of the regular expressions to manage the string. In this tip, I'll build a CLR function which cleans up a string of HTML tags and special characters. I'll use Visual Studio 2010 with C# as the programming language. Check out this tip for my solution.  Read more...

When you are first learning PowerShell, it often seems to be an 'Alice through the looking-glass' world. Just the simple process of comparing and selecting strings can seem strangely obtuse. Michael turns the looking-glass into wonderland with his wall-chart of the PowerShell string-comparison operators and syntax  Read more...

Returns the item from a delimited list at the specified position. Both position and delimiter are parameters.  Read more...

Takes a delimited list and prepends a value to the beginning.  Read more...

Often in database design we store different values in rows to take advantage of a normalized design. However many times we need to combine multiple rows of data into one row for a report of some sort. New author Carl P. Anderson brings us some interesting T-SQL code to accomplish this.  Read more...

This article from Todd Fifield shows a Way to avoid the dreaded LIKE operator in your queries and dramatically speed up keyword searches.  Read more...

We often have need of string splitting in applications. I had need of one in some T-SQL development I am currently doing for a friend.  Read more...

I have added 2 functions here, one for email validation and another to split the string by specified separator by user.  Read more...

A generic character padding function. Useful for situations where you need fixed width formatting e.g. email reports.  Read more...

Fill in another bit of your T-SQL knowledge about STR(). It right justifies, rounds, and controls the output width of columns. Sounds perfect but here's why you might not want to use it.  Read more...

Function to format phone numbers entered as text.   Read more...